children of my civilisation
by Shrrgnien
Summary: Alone and afraid, Clara and the TARDIS share the most precious memory in all of time and space. Meanwhile, Thetasigma Lungbarrow is kind of a dick. Coauthored with/brainchild of incendiarist.


_coauthored with (read: thought of and mostly written by) the ever-wonderful **incendiarist**_

* * *

_Oh, not again_, she thought, looking back into the corridor she'd run down. "Doctor!" she called, and, receiving no response, turned and ran down a new corridor. She couldn't stop running, not with the things—whatever they were—chasing after her. Or maybe they weren't chasing after her anymore. She couldn't afford to stop and find out.

The walls whispered as she ran. _"Come on, Ace,"_ said a man, his voice changing, morphing into a young woman's_,"if we're going to die, we may as well..."_ There was movement in the corner of her eye, and she turned around to empty space._ "Don't touch anything, Jamie!"_ someone called, the ghost of a long-past warning.

_"What are those beasties?"_ said another, like a recording.

_"Echoes,"_ said the first.

"Doctor?" she called again. She forced herself to stop running; there was a corner ahead that she had no intention of barrelling blindly around, thank you very much. "Doctor, are you there?"

The walls did not whisper anything remotely helpful, though she thought she could make out something about jelly babies.

Something moved, just around the corner.

"...Doctor?" she asked weakly, but she already knew the answer. Whatever was around that corner, it wasn't human. Or... whatever the Doctor was. Two-hearted alien with a blue box. It wasn't that.

There were no branches off this hallway, although she was certain she'd only just turned into it; just a long hexagon-shaped tube with an evil lava zombie monster coming towards her. (_"A sliver of ice in his heart,_" Emma had said. _"Don't trust him._")

_A little help would be nice,_ she thought hopefully at anything not a zombie that might be listening. The shuffle-crunching-flopping sound was getting closer._ Please?_ she thought desperately, backing down the corridor. _I'll give you a new coat of paint I'll never fly you into a pocket universe again I'll buy you an umbrella stand—_

She was absolutely certain the door wasn't there last time she checked, but she managed to fumble it open and slam it behind her just before the whatever-it-was came around the corner.

There was a child's mobile at level with her waist, attached to that old wooden cot with the circular motifs she saw around the TARDIS so often.

This wasn't the way she had gotten into this storage room before, she was completely sure. It should have been on the other side of the ship, shouldn't it have been? She wondered for a moment if the Doctor had as much trouble moving around inside of this thing as she did, or if he had some sort of constantly-updating map in his head, or something.

She turned to check the door was locked, only to find that it wasn't there. "Thanks?" she offered the ship weakly. It didn't respond, which was probably a good sign. She sighed, leaning on one of the work tables. "So, are you going to tell me what's going on, by any chance?" she said, without much hope.

_"You don't deserve any explanations,"_ the walls whispered,_ "You pushed your way in here, uninvited and unwelcome."_

Another voice, then, nearly frantic,_ "But I want to understand!"_

Dismissively: _"Yes, yes, yes..."_

Clara was rather certain the memory was meant as a message for her.

"Grumpy old _cow_," she said firmly, jabbing a finger at the ceiling for emphasis.

"You don't know what you've done coming here!" said the walls, one last argument as the memory faded away. Clara huffed irritably, and picked up an odd cylindrical tool not too unlike the Doctor's sonic screwdriver, inspecting it. There was a button on the side, and the thing lit up blue when she pressed it, making a tinny sound.

"What was that?" said a girl's voice. The same, Clara thought, as the last which had spoken, though it sounded different in a way she couldn't define, and younger.

"Shhh!" hissed another. "It might be a guard."

"In an old Type 40?" asked the girl disbelievingly. "My grandfather had a Type 40 when he was young."

The other voice said something long and unpronounceable, sounding vaguely horrified. "—be nice! My family has a Type 40, they're _brilliant_, really. I flew in a 73 once, at the Medusa Cascade, and it was horrible, all sterile and quiet and still. You can't _feel_ anything, they haven't got personalities!"

"Whatever you say, _grandpa_," muttered the girl. "Oh! Who are you?"

Clara turned around, shocked. "You're really here?" she said.

"Of course I'm really here," said the little girl. "Where else would I be?" She was maybe seven or eight, with jaw-length black hair and a bright yellow robe. There was a matching ribbon in her hair. Childhood dress senses were the same throughout the universe, apparently.

Clara crouched down to the little girl's level. "It's just, you weren't here a moment ago," she explained. "I'm Clara. What's your name?"

The girl said the same mess of syllables the other voice had used, carefully enunciating it, with the proud smile of a kid who's just grown back their front teeth and can pronounce esses again. She'd probably recently learnt to say the whole thing, Clara figured.

Clara smiled self-deprecatingly. "I don't think I'm going to be able to remember that," she said. "Do you have a nickname I can call you by?"

"My friends call me Arkytior," said Arkytior. "Or Lady Larn, _officially_." She said the latter with the disgust of any kid who really didn't like their name.

"Well," Clara said briskly. She'd learnt from experience that when children said things that didn't make sense, it was usually a good idea to just accept it and move on. Children she could handle. She was good with children. "You seem to know what's going on here. Fancy helping me out? I'm new," she confessed. "Don't really know my way around yet."

Arkytior giggled. "You're in the museum," she began, but the other voice—the other person—cut her off.

"Don't talk to it, Arkytior," he warned, glaring down at Clara. "Interacting with displaced temporal anomalies only encourages them."

"I'm not a temporal anomaly, and I'm not an it," said Clara. He was relatively short, probably only a few inches taller than Clara, but then she was crouching beside Arkytior, and the gold-and-scarlet ceremonial robes made him seem quite a bit more imposing. "Nice, er, hat... thing." She grinned at Arkytior. "Is he your big brother?"

"Theta's my great-grandfather," said Arkytior matter-of-factly. "He was re-Loomed to House Lungbarrow. And now we're running away from Gallifrey because everyone thinks Theta killed the Lord President, and the people who really killed the Lord President are going to try to kill me because I'm the last direct descendant of Rassilon."

"...Well!" said Clara. "How exciting."

"Arkytior, stop playing with the human," Theta said distractedly, looking at something Clara couldn't see with wonderment. "You'll fall ill. They have germs."

"Oy!" Clara protested. "I do not!"

"Everyone has _some_ germs," Arkytior pointed out reasonably.

"But I don't have weird alien germs. Only weird aliens have weird alien germs, and you're the only weird aliens here." Clara was having a very rough day.

"I'm not weird!" Arkytior argued.

"Then Theta must have enough weird alien germs for both of you!" said Clara, winking.

Arkytior considered this for a moment before nodding as if the argument made perfect sense. Clara was pretty sure that it did, so long as weird alien germs moonlighted as pretentious alien germs.

"Arkytior," said Theta harshly, jolting out of his reverie. "We don't have time for you to pick up a new pet. You know nothing about how to take care of humans."

"Take _care_ of–!" Clara hissed. "Why you little–"

Theta's mouth twitched . "Look, I'm sure you're lovely, for a human, but we really don't have time for temporal anomalies at the moment; we sort of have people _after our heads_. So if you'll excuse us, please."

"Well don't let me keep you," Clara said, miffed.

"If it flies at all," said Arkytior. "It's ancient! It's a museum piece!"

Theta had a hand outstretched, resting on something Clara couldn't see, with a strange little moony smile on his face. "No it isn't," he said, lost in his own little world again. "It's the most beautiful thing I've ever known."

"What are you looking at?" said Clara, slightly concerned.

"Shhh!" Arkytior hissed. "This is the important part. Don't interrupt them, it's _rude_."

"Interrupt who? Who's _them_?" Clara demanded in a whisper, because she could only see one very antisocial young man with absolutely terrible fashion sense staring in awe at nothing in particular.

"We have to leave," Theta muttered to himself, lifting a hand gingerly and then losing his nerve and yanking it away again. "We _have_ to... I can _make_ it fly if I have to... no," he said, backing away from whatever it was that Clara couldn't see. He shook his head, looking afraid and miserable, and Clara was reminded of herself in primary school when she'd been called up to give a presentation about tadpoles in front of the class—scared and shy and afraid of being judged but wanting_ so badly_ not to be.

"She won't fly," Theta said desperately, as if he didn't really want to believe it. "She _won't_, will she, not for me, she's too..." He swallowed. "She's too _much_, she wouldn't, not for _me_..."

There was a faint sound, the sort that Clara had learnt to associate with the Doctor flying the TARDIS, and Theta pulled his hand back from whatever-it-was in shock, staring at the empty space rapturously.

"There, see?" said Arkytior, "It likes you just fine."

Clara thought Theta might actually start to cry. Never taking his eyes off whatever he could see that she couldn't, he reached out a trembling hand and wrapped his fingers around something—a knob, or a lever of some sort.

"...We," he said weakly. "We... we need to get away. Anywhere. Er..." He turned helplessly to Arkytior. "Where do you want to go?"

"You promised you'd take me to Arcateen V when you graduated," Arkytior pressed.

"I still haven't actually graduated, though," said Theta.

"You have a doctorate," said Arkytior, "and you took your final exams already. That's close enough. I want to see the Artists' District!" She turned to Clara, and said in a stage whisper, "He thinks that just because he's a wanted criminal now he doesn't have to keep his promises."

Clara wasn't sure whether she was meant to laugh or not; it might have been a joke, but Arkytior said it so _seriously_.

Theta, meanwhile, had turned back to his invisible source of fascination. "I... Arcateen V... two hundred—what? We can't go _that_ far—I... two hundred thousand years, then, I think... I... this one?" He reached out and carefully mimed pushing a button, glancing up nervously for approval before painstakingly turning something.

"He only got 51% on his exams," whispered Arkytior.

"He's nervous," Clara whispered back. "Be patient, he'll get it."

Theta had returned to his death-grip on the invisible lever. "Arkytior," he said shakily. "I think...this is it."

"Oh," said Arkytior. "Bye, Clara! Will we meet again?"

Clara doubted it, but Arkytior looked so hopeful, so she nodded and smiled.

"I told you not to encourage it, Arkytior," Theta said, exasperated.

Clara stood up, leaning against the wall. "_You've_ got people after you," she reminded him. "I reckon you should hurry it up, don't you?"

He nodded briskly. "Best of luck finding your own time again," he said politely, and pulled the lever. They faded away as the Doctor opened the there-again door. "Clara?" he said.

"There you are!" she said accusingly. "I couldn't find you anywhere! There were lava zombies after me, and why do you _have_ those, anyway?"

"Clara, are you alright?"

The anger drained out of her, tiredness taking its place. "Yeah, I'm fine. The TARDIS helped me."

The Doctor grinned. "See, I knew you two'd get along!" he said, swinging their clasped hands cheerfully as he lead her through another identical corridor.

"Doctor," she said. "Who are Arkytior and Theta?"

He stared at her for a moment, and then looked away. "We should probably run now," he said.

They ran.

_finis_.


End file.
